... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 11) April 1986 Last| Contents| Next Issue 11 Wilson, MI5 and the Rise of Thatcher Covert Operations in British Politics 1974-1978 Destabilising the Wilson government 1974-76 1975, the year that saw the formation of NAFF, was also the second year of an unprecedented smear campaign against the Labour Party, and, to a lesser extent, the Liberal Party. The major target of this campaign, and as far as we are aware the only senior politician who has been willing to talk about it, is Harold Wilson. Wilson spoke most extensively to the journalists Penrose and Courtier (Pencourt). Their book, The Pencourt File, appeared almost ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 50) Winter 2005/6 Last| Contents| Next Issue 50 Downing Street Diary: With Harold Wilson in No. 10 Bernard Donoughue London: Jonathan Cape, £25, h/b Political diaries are among my favourite reading. In that genre this is an absolute belter; but not for the minutiae of policy formation, with which Donoughue was primarily preoccupied, or the account of the government's handling of various incidents, interesting though they are; but for the picture it contains of the people of No. 10 Downing St. in the Wilson administrations of the 1970s and the light it throws on some of the central themes in ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 56) Winter 2008/9 Last| Contents| Next Issue 56 Harold Wilson, the Bank of England and the Cecil King 'coup' of May 1968 Scott Newton I: Wilson, Cromer and the City One anniversary which has come and gone this year without much comment is the attempted 1968 'coup' orchestrated by Cecil King against the Labour government of Harold Wilson. The plot was provoked by collapse of confidence in Wilson in the media (led by King's Daily Mirror), finance, industry and the wider public. King's idea was that the Queen's cousin, Lord Mountbatten, would take over at the head of an Emergency Government, backed ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 17) November 1988 Last| Contents| Next Issue 17 Five at Eye Steve Dorril Last year the Guardian newspaper revealed that Private Eye 'may have been used to smear Wilson'. The former editor, Richard Ingrams, told reporters: "Looking back on it, it's obvious that the Eye could have been used by MI5, but it's hard to be concrete." Its hard to be concrete because nobody bothered to look at what Private Eye did produce in the crucial years 1974-76. Having now read the entire Eye output of the seventies, it is clear the Eye was a major outlet for the MI5 material (1) As we ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 11) April 1986 Last| Contents| Next Issue 11 Wilson, MI5 and the Rise of Thatcher Covert Operations in British Politics 1974-1978 An Outline of the Contents In 1976, just before and just after his resignation as Prime Minister, Harold Wilson made a number of charges about South African activities in British politics, and, more interesting and more serious, expressed anxieties about MI5 in relation to the Labour Government of the day and to himself personally. There was brief flurry of interest in the media and the House of Commons and then- almost nothing. (1) This extraordinary lack of interest in unprecedented charges by a senior British politician ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 40) Winter 2000/1 Last| Contents| Next Issue 40 Historical Notes Scott Newton MI5 and the Wilson Plot The MI5 website (www.mi5.gov.uk) has a section called 'myths and misunderstandings', which features, among other things, 'the Wilson Plot'. The paragraph it devotes to this episode is worth studying. It refers the reader to Spycatcher and Peter Wright's allegation that 'up to 30 members of the Service had plotted to undermine former Prime Minister, Harold Wilson'. MI5 say that the allegation was 'exhaustively investigated and it was concluded, as stated publicly by Ministers, that no such plot ever existed'. In the end, ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 22) November 1991 Last| Contents| Next Issue 22 A review of the (bad) reviews of Smear! Wilson and the Secret State Robin Ramsay It was very interesting being reviewed by the major media. While the left press- New Statesman, Tribune, Socialist et al- Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books and the non-metropolitan and Irish papers like it, we were slagged off by the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Times, the Observer, the Independent; and by Joe Haines in the Daily Mirror. (As we went to press the Guardian had not reviewed it.) Philip Ziegler had first go ...

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... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 49) Summer 2005 Last| Contents| Next Issue 49 Historical Notes: Wilson and sterling in 1964 Scott Newton When Labour narrowly won the October 1964 election they were greeted by dismal balance of payments figures. An external deficit in the region of £800 million was forecast, twice what had been expected (although the actual figure has since been revised down to £372 million). The government attempted to manage the crisis by a package of measures centred in the short term on a 15 per cent tariff on manufactured goods and fiscal measures to help exporters; in the longer term it aimed for growth in exports via agreement with both sides ...

... history for years to come. Discounted from sellers like Amazon, this is a seriously good buy. But I'm not an academic and my interests are political. I looked initially at two areas: what it said about MI5's relationship with the British left since WW2, and particularly the role of the CPGB in British politics; and the so-called Wilson plots. Let's take the left first. Elsewhere in this issue is my contribution to the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom's book on the 1984 miners' strike. In that I repeat for the umpteenth time Peter Wright's story in Spycatcher that MI5 knew about the covert Soviet funding of the CPGB in the 1950s and neither exposed it nor ...